Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In astronomy, the barycenter (or barycentre; from Ancient Greek βαρύς (barús) 'heavy' and κέντρον (kéntron) 'center') [1] is the center of mass of two or more bodies that orbit one another and is the point about which the bodies orbit. A barycenter is a dynamical point, not a physical object.
Barycentric coordinates are strongly related to Cartesian coordinates and, more generally, affine coordinates.For a space of dimension n, these coordinate systems are defined relative to a point O, the origin, whose coordinates are zero, and n points , …,, whose coordinates are zero except that of index i that equals one.
The barycenter is the point between two objects where they balance each other; it is the center of mass where two or more celestial bodies orbit each other. When a moon orbits a planet , or a planet orbits a star , both bodies are actually orbiting a point that lies away from the center of the primary (larger) body. [ 25 ]
The centroid of a ring or a bowl, for example, lies in the object's central void. If the centroid is defined, it is a fixed point of all isometries in its symmetry group . In particular, the geometric centroid of an object lies in the intersection of all its hyperplanes of symmetry .
Good examples of true binary companions are the 90 Antiope and the 79360 Sila–Nunam systems. Pluto and its largest moon Charon are sometimes described as a binary system because the barycenter (center of mass) of the two objects is not inside either of them, but Charon is small enough compared to Pluto that it is usually classified as a moon. [4]
A disputed example of a system that may lack a primary is Pluto and its moon Charon. The barycenter of those two bodies is always outside Pluto's surface. This has led some astronomers to call the Pluto–Charon system a double or binary dwarf planet , rather than simply a dwarf planet (the primary) and its moon.
The barycentric subdivision is an operation on simplicial complexes. In algebraic topology it is sometimes useful to replace the original spaces with simplicial complexes via triangulations: The substitution allows to assign combinatorial invariants as the Euler characteristic to the spaces.
The most prominent example of the classical two-body problem is the gravitational case (see also Kepler problem), arising in astronomy for predicting the orbits (or escapes from orbit) of objects such as satellites, planets, and stars. A two-point-particle model of such a system nearly always describes its behavior well enough to provide useful ...